National Regulator(s) for Urdu as a language?
Hey. Native Urdu speaker from Delhi, India here. Growing up, I studied in an English-medium school and studied Hindi till class 10th (Urdu wasn't an option). On top of that, my parents never made a deliberate effort to pass on the language to their children because "learning Urdu in today's age is of no use" (this is said in the context of India btw, Urdu serves as the language of administration only in a few provinces & regions - my Pakistani brothers & sisters might not relate to 'Urdu not yielding economic benefits' as much Indian counterparts do)
Since the lockdown had started, I began on the journey of teaching Urdu to myself from scratch. Now that I'm relatively proficient in it - both reading & writing (and being an avid prose-reader), I've noticed that Urdu novels (and colloquial language as well of course) contain a whole lot of English words, and it is used to the point that it seems as if our own language has no word for that word/phenomenon/event,etc. and I feel really bad about this.
Before anyone brings up this, I do very well understand and am aware of the fact that languages do evolve over time and are never retained in their 'pristine' form, but c'mon, we weren't born yesterday to believe this about the humongous english loanwords that are thwarted onto urdu (and all other languages of the subcontinent btw) - this is very unnatural. The evolution of languages that we normally refer to, is a phenomenon where languages give and take to each other, over a period of time. Apparently with English, firstly because of British colonisation and secondly because of globalisation and emergence of the USA as arguably the sole political and economic superpower - there's only been take, take and take by languages of the subcontinent.
Now, I do believe that nuances exist in this argument. In India specifically, english kind of played a unifying role amongst the hundreds of languages spoken throughout the country, and given the context of mass protests against imposition of hindi as the national language - it was understandable to make english the official language since it was new for all of the people within the country and no group will be disproportionately advantaged/disadvantaged.
So I say this not to sound like an anti-English person, but what I say is that all the native speakers of urdu (or any other language) should have a relatively strong degree of mastery over their own language - and in the context of the topic of this post, I was wondering how language regulators play a role in doing so. Many Asian countries - South Korea, Japan, China, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, etc. - they all have alternatives for modern english terms in their respective languages, even if they do use English loanwords, it's not to the deep extent that Urdu speakers in the subcontinent do. I'm aware that both Pakistan and India have regulators for Urdu, but I was wondering how much actual work do these regulators do in, for instance, translating technical, modern terms in Urdu, so that the common people know about it and make prevalent the use of that word in urdu rather than just copy pasting the English word.
Especially as a novel reader, it pisses me off SO BADLY when literally every other line has an absurd transliteration of some English word that was absolutely unnecessary to use in that particular context. That's why I think that if we (Urdu speakers from both of the countries, and maybe even beyond), make Urdu equivalents of english terms popular, i think it'd do good to both - the language & it's dignity as well as provide an alternative for the young generation of native Urdu speakers so that they'd feel proud of their language ;)
DISCLAIMER - I'm very well aware that in today's globalised world, learning english is inevitable in order to lead a good life. I'm in no way advocating that people should not learn English. What I AM against is the blatant, hyper excessive use of English loanwords in common (as well as academic) Urdu, as if we don't have native words for those things for which we're using the English loanwords. If not, why should not the regulators of the language step in (from both countries), and actively make dictionaries of a sort for all the technical, modern terms in English and respectively enumerate their Urdu alternatives? Basically, native Urdu speakers should be fluent in their language and Urdu should incorporate alternatives for modern terms, just like how Farsi, Arabic, Korean, Turkish and many other Asian languages have done. The question is, what is stopping us, even though we've one of largest speaking populations amongst all languages?